An expat Canadian takes the reins of a library with the aim of giving a realistic view of the former U.S. president.

YORBA LINDA, Calif.–It took a transplanted Canadian to do it, but the warts and blemishes return to Richard Nixon's whitewashed place in history today.

The shrine to America's most shamed president here officially moves from private to federal hands under the guidance of 45-year-old Timothy Naftali, a Montreal-born historian and expert on presidential recordings.

Naftali is transforming the homage to Nixon from what critics had disparaged as a Disneyland-type tourist trap into an honest historical look at the life and career of the only U.S. president to resign in scandal.

He did it by meticulously dismantling an exhibit on Watergate that described the event as a "coup'' by Nixon's enemies, rather than the event that defined Nixon's life and legacy and in many ways the way Americans looked at presidents and the powerful.

Like Nixon himself, the exhibit did not go easily, metaphorically clinging to its cherished wing in the private library much as the 37th president did before his 1974 resignation.

"I'm a historian. I can't sugar-coat things,'' he said. "History is messy, dramatic, exciting. There are good people and bad people and that's what makes it interesting.

"You have to tell history with the bark off.''

Until today, the Nixon library, which opened in 1990, had been one of only a couple of presidential libraries outside the public system.

The new library will have access to some 78,000 pages of documents from the Nixon White House that had been previously withheld, and more than 11 hours of tapes focusing on the 1972 presidential election.

For 30 years, a total of 44 million pages of Nixon's presidential records and 3,000 hours of Nixon White House tapes had remained, by law, within a 40-kilometre radius of the nation's capital so Watergate-related evidence would not be destroyed.

All that changed with an act of Congress in 2004, and Naftali was named the first federal director of the library last summer.

Naftali left his job as a University of Virginia historian to take on the task, but he had already forged a stellar reputation as an author and political commentator.

A one-time aide to Quebec premier Robert Bourassa, he left Canada over Quebec's language legislation.

"It seemed to me that the deck was stacked against civil liberties and I preferred to be in a country where I didn't have to worry about what language I spoke,'' he said.

He is now an American. But he will always be a Montrealer.

As he waxed about Nixon and presidential tapes and transcripts over coffee in downtown Los Angeles recently, he also spoke wistfully about Montreal bagels and his late, lamented love, the Montreal Expos.

"This was a great challenge,'' he said. "I didn't want people saying I was replacing one view of Watergate with my own, whatever mine happened to be.

"People deserve a 360 degree view of a subject as controversial and as important to a country as Watergate.''

He will give visitors the tools to come to their own conclusions about the greatest scandal in modern American political history.

It will begin with Nixon's establishment of the so-called Plumbers Unit to plug leaks, a reaction to the 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers, the secret government study of the Vietnam War.

Nixon's "plumbers" broke into the Beverly Hills office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the papers, seeking a file to discredit the leaker.

Naftali is putting in place a series of interactive plasma TV screens in which he interviews the surviving players from Watergate, which was a seminal moment in American history now lost to a generation of U.S. high school graduates.

Visitors will hear from Egil "Bud'' Krogh, who established the Plumbers Unit, Dwight Chapin, the appointments secretary who hired "dirty tricks'' operatives to disrupt the 1972 Democratic campaign, and Democrats on the judiciary committee during the era.

They can listen to the reminiscences of deputy attorney-general William Ruckelshaus, who resigned in what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre'' rather than fire the prosecutor demanding Nixon's secret tapes, and Jeb Magruder, the White House aide who supervised the break-in at the Watergate Hotel.

It is, Naftali agrees, a historian's dream. "I've tried to find a responsible way to present a controversial subject without softening the rough edges,'' he said.

Institutions often seek a "false consensus'' in presenting history to the public, Naftali says, and end up with Pablum.

"I don't want to offend anyone, but I think it's offensive to the public not to get the truth.''

The pre-Naftali Nixon library was a surreal journey down a well-scrubbed historic path.

Visitors immediately learned that Nixon's ancestors were hard-working people of humble origins and the former president was named after Richard the Lion-Hearted. But his 1973 resignation amidst corruption charges was never mentioned.

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